I read Neil Smith's comments with some incredulity. Before making
lofty appeals to history, it is surely necessary to have a firmer
grasp of the drift of Balkan history and the interplay between local
forces and the interests of global powers. (There is no better
starting point than Peter Gowan's article, NATO's Balkan Tragedy,
in the most recent edition of New Left Review).
To take issue with just a couple of points:
1) Regarding Neil Smith's comments about the role of "Serbian
nationalism now fascism ... utterly offensive not defensive":
The war in Bosnia was precipitated by a declaration of independent
statehood (which was bitterly opposed by Bosnian Serbs) in the full
knowledge that it would be resisted by Bosnian Serbs. The
atrocities that occurred subsequently were committed by all three
sides, although reporting in the West was timorously one-sided.
If the quest for a Greater Serbia is to be condemned, then why
not that for a Greater Croatia (Croatia continues to regard
those parts of the Bosnian Federation inhabited by Croats
as a part of Croatia proper)?
2) Neil Smith needs to be a little more careful in his references to
Montenegro. As a rough estimate, a half of Montenegrans
consider themselves to be Serbs. Milosevic has "had his sights" on
Montenegro ever since Djukanovic won in the last elections there.
But the present US/NATO campaign has done nothing other than to
jeopardise Djukanovic's position and cast the people into a state
of defensive confusion and anger (against US/NATO, by the way).
Surely we need to be just a little more conscious of the enormously
ruthless effort that US/NATO is putting into manipulating moral
indignation among the citizens of the liberal democracies of the West.
The motives of the prime actors on the NATO side are varied,
but in the last resort relatively simple -- the projection of power,
the establishment of bases, the securing of territories, for
purposes, more or less direct, of economic exploitation. To which
now must be added a new impulse, that of saving their own dirty faces.
Paul Waley
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Paul Waley
School of Geography
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
U.K.
tel: 44-113-233-3338; fax: 44-113-233-3308
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
(also [log in to unmask])
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk
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